Low-Salinity Waterflooding to Improve Oil Recovery - Historical Field Evidence

Waterflooding is by far the most widely applied method of improved oil recovery. Crude oil/brine/rock interactions can lead to large variations in the displacement efficiency of wa-terfloods. Laboratory water-flood tests and single-well tracer tests have shown that injection of dilute brine can increase oil recovery, but work designed to test the method on a field scale has not yet been undertaken. Historical waterflood records could unintentionally provide some evidence of improved recovery from waterflooding with lower salinity brine. Nu-merous fields in the Powder River basin of Wyoming have been waterflooded using low salinity brine (about 500 ppm) obtained from the Madison limestone or Fox Hills sandstone. Three Minnelusa formation fields in the basin were identified as potential candidates for waterflood comparisons based on the salinity of the connate and injection water. Historical pro-duction and injection data for these fields were obtained from the public record. Field waterflood data were manipulated to be displayed in the same format as laboratory coreflood re-sults. Recovery from fields using lower salinity injection wa-ter was greater than that using higher salinity injection wa-ter—matching recovery trends for laboratory and single-well tests